Cd/dvd

Ok well basically ive just built my first PC and everything seemed to work fine on boot up untill my cd/dvd drive stopped working. It dosent read any discs at all ( although i installed a game when i first used the pc .) Nothing appears when i put the disc in. i click on the DVD-RAM drive in My Computer and it locks up until i take the disc out. Kinda annoying maybe the drive is dead already?
its set to master if thats what u call it. i checked bios it detects the drive.
Its a samsung model with lightscribe. The light on the front also flashes on and off for about 5seconds once the disc is inserted if that means anything.
Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Thx

ultimate test is to disconnect your hard drive, stick the OS cd in the cd/dvd drive and see if the system will boot from the cd/dvd. If it does, and refuses to work once windows is running it might be a driver issue.

Ooops - sorry!
Queue barging is the most frightful sin, don't you know!
Still, you are spot on with the bit about no need to disconnect the HDD.
One off the wall idea - I came across a similar problem the other day where someone had connected a SATA DVD drive to a RAID enabled connection on the m/board by mistake - the HDD was on a different RAIDed pair. Don't ask me how they did it because I could not.